Category Archives: Relation with Schools

Increasingly, the operators of small juku (塾長) seem to be offering themselves as education consultants to insecure parents. Whether this is also happening in the more corporate and chain jukus I don’t know.

What I mean by education consulting in this context is that operators of juku are stepping into roles that would have generally been taken on (whether in Japan or elsewhere) by parents or extended family. They are thus increasingly acting in loco parentis. Whether it is in instilling an appreciation for education itself in children or whether it is teaching manners, proper behaviour and generally socializing children, these are aspects of juku attendance of elementary school children that are increasingly highlighted by teachers and operators.

One area where the consulting function of juku is most obvious is in the selection of higher levels of education. With the introduction of school choice at the middle school level (throughout Tokyo and in many other parts of the country), parents of older elementary school students are increasingly facing such a plethora of choices that they are looking to professionals for help. This isn’t the kind of help that we sometimes read about for Manhattan where some high-priced consultant is meant to assist a child to get into a specific preschool or elementary school, but instead the jukucho are often looked to for providing advice on what school students might focus on in the first place.

There are some aspects of how parents are approaching school choice that seem to necessitate this kind of help. Geographical distance is not seen as an obvious criterion of selecting a school by many parents in metropolitan regions. At least it is not a criterion that trumps other criteria. This is in part due to the high reliance on public transport and the trust in students, even elementary students, to be able to rely on public transport for a commute to school that may stretch as long as 90 min. Another factor is that there seems to be less of a concern than I hear around me in Vancouver now or remember from my Berlin childhood, about enrolling siblings in the same school.

So, given the lack of constraint by geography or siblings’ prior choice, a Tokyo elementary school student could theoretically consider hundreds of schools as options. This is where discussions with the jukucho narrow the choices. Of course, practice entrance examinations already narrow the choices significantly in that the scores and ranking (偏差値) will have the student and her parents focus on a narrow band of schools that fall near her hensachi score with perhaps one or two ambitious choices and a safety choice. Beyond this strictly numerical choice, however, jukucho offer their insights into specific aspects of schools. This goes much beyond the increasingly active attempts by schools to establish a profile for their offerings in an era of school choice, but includes such factors of the level of ambition of sports teams in a given school, the general atmosphere at the school (is this where cultural capital may be sneaking into decisions?), opportunities for student exchanges or common destinations for graduation trips, etc.

School Brochures at a Tokyo-Area Juku

Given the role of jukucho in dispensing such advice, many private schools are increasingly courting juku operators through various kinds of fairs. Some jukucho have also reported to me that they’re beginning to build on prior relationships with (predominantly private) schools that allow them not only to speak about some (somewhat local) schools with greater authority/inside knowledge, but potentially also to “get students into” these schools, even when their entrance examination result may have fallen slightly short of the result required.

Note that as far as I’m aware, none of these consulting services are for-fee. Instead they are offered as a service to long-attending students. But jukucho are clearly branching out from the “mere offering of courses” through such additional advice/consulting.

Among educational institutions in contemporary developed countries, juku seem somewhat unusual in that they don’t appear to confer cultural capital, at least not in the classical sense that Bourdieu identified to be so important to class reproduction in Western Europe.

In Distinction Bourdieu proposed “cultural capital” as a helpful notion to understand intergenerational class-reproduction in postwar welfare states. If the state equalizes economic capital and safeguards workers’ rights and livelihoods to some extent, how come we still see intergenerational class reproduction, was the question he was addressing. One element in the answer was that education not only confers skills (human resources), but that it also confers prestige and subtle familiarity along class-lines that individuals can display (cash in on, to stay in the language of capital) at later stages. For example, highly-regarded secondary schools may not teach any content in a particular different way from any run-of-the-mill lycée, but students at these institutions (drawn largely from a class-homogeneous population) may be taught a curriculum that emphasizes highly-validated content or ways of talking about this content that distinguish graduates of such an institution.

{Note that this is obviously a very simplified and painfully simplistic version of Bourdieu’s concepts and their influence.}

High Cultural Capital in Juku?

While plenty of arguments can be made that cultural capital may be playing a different role in different cultural/national contexts and over time, this is one of the concepts that has clearly inspired a lot of research in the sociology of education over the past three decades or so.

Now, cultural capital and juku?

In their public and private self-representation, juku certainly don’t claim to be a place to acquire cultural capital, at least not of the high culture variety. Jukucho would immediately point to the predominance of standardized testing that would not make it possible for applicants (to higher education, to jobs, etc.) to display (and thus cash in) any cultural capital. There is also no evidence that juku attendance leads to lasting social ties of the kind that some secondary school and university clubs do (most famously baseball and rugby teams, for boys at least). This seems to be the case even though attendance at juku may stretch out over a much longer period (some time in elementary school through secondary education, and for some students on into higher education when they “return” to a juku as a teacher). So the immediate answer on (high) cultural capital would have to be, no, juku don’t seem to confer this.

Learning How to Learn

What about the kind of cultural capital that is more focused on study/learning skills. So, how to organize homework as opposed to knowledge of classical composers. Here, juku certainly claim that they are infusing students with cultural capital, specifically by teaching students how to learn. While the kind of learning that is being taught in juku with its focus on processing speed, correctness of answers selected from multiple choices, etc. is very particular, long-term attendance at a juku would certainly seem to reinforce this kind of cultural capital, and it is this kind of learning that may lead to greater chances at success at later stages in education that do in turn confer cultural capital, particularly the prestige associated with specific institutions of higher education. Takehiko Kariya (Oxford and 東大) has been arguing that learning capital is one of the crucial variables in Japanese stratification (see his Asia Pacific Memo for related arguments).

The Future of Cultural Capital in Juku

Juku will change in the future. From succession problems in small juku to a decrease in the competitiveness into higher education institutions due to the decline in the number of children, to some mild tendencies to broaden the access points to higher education, it seems like juku’s role may be declining in significance. Countervailing trends could be seen in the potential of juku to gain a more formal standing as alternative schools.

Another avenue for cultural capital to begin mattering more would be through a greater prevalence of admission to universities “by recommendation” rather than entrance examination. Perhaps some of the more well-known juku will gain the “right” to nominate students in the future?

Or, if students’ perception that the “real learning” occurs in juku gains in prominence, perhaps companies will begin hiring on the basis of which juku an individual attended?